Viral web marketing has since become a very effective form of online marketing. It is quite effective, because as the name suggest, this form of marketing helps spread the marketing message like a virus. The basics of viral marketing are quite simple and easy to understand and implement. In basic principle, this marketing strategy involves creating a buzz or fuzz on the internet that people will like to spread around. You then attach your marketing message to what you created so that the message spreads as the creation is spread around.

There are several viral internet sites that successfully implement viral marketing strategies. Some of such web sites offer attractive referral programs or utilize website links to reach the desired audience. Successful viral web marketing involves high level of creativity to create an effective strategy.

This guide to viral internet marketing seeks to introduce you to basic techniques that have been successfully implemented by other internet marketers. By going through this list of strategies that have been used to create viral web sites and offers, you can broaden your view of viral marketing and design the strategy that is best for you.

Creating and giving out free software: Everyone loves a useful application that is free. If you cannot create a software or application yourself, you can get a freelance programmer to do one for you. Just be sure that the application is functional and useful to your target audience, and that your marketing message is included in the software.

Free newsletters: Giving quality newsletters that contain useful information in your niche is a very effective way to do viral internet marketing. It helps establish you as an authority in your niche, while also helping to spread you’re your marketing message. Newsletters should be eye catchy, trendy and informative.

Specialized Link Directories: These directories help people access information faster and are so usually enjoy heavy traffic. You can thus create specialized link directories to serve as viral internet sites that will help spread your marketing message faster.

Free Email Accounts: This is one example to effectively spread your corporate image like a virus. Hotmail did it and today they are worth millions. Each new user signed up for free, but after signing up, they became exposed to the marketing message and also helped spread it as they sent emails from their Hotmail accounts. Copying this strategy may not give the same successful result as it gave others in the past, but it remains an effective way to create viral web sites.

Free web space: Providing free web space is a great viral internet marketing strategy that will surely attract people. Offering quality web space service is one way to create viral web sites. A lot of people will certainly be interested in getting some free web space and you can append a marketing message or logo, which will be seen by all the web visitors.

Provide other forms of free services: The point is to create a useful viral web sites service that your target audience will appreciate. The service should be free and something that they can easily share around. Good examples that fall under this form of viral web marketing include giving bonuses, free e-cards, free screensavers, free redirect services, free email training course, free templates, graphics and banners. Depending on the industry you operate in, you can also offer free consultation and use the opportunity to spread your message.

Seeing what others miss
How many small business owners really have an accurate description of their web market?

The reason this question comes up is because the vast majority of business web sites do not even speak to their market. In fact, the only people the web site speaks to are company people such as owners and managers.

We can all see the company clearly in any business design, but our market is not interested in our company. They have their problems and they have no need, right now, to know what wonderful people make up this business web site.

If our market cannot see how the web site is trying to help them then help is not there. If our intention is to build a relationship with our market then the help we offer needs to be the first thing our market sees. They love this and they want this and it is the best part of our marketing.

How do small business designs block their own market?
A good analogy is found when we meet someone that only talks about themselves. We get bored instantly when we realize they have nothing of interest to offer us.

I remember growing up as a young kid and with friends we would sometimes run into this older character that bragged about his rich uncle that had a Cadillac a block long and he had to take it to the airport to turn it around.

We weren’t fooled but we got a good laugh. At least he was entertaining even if he wasn’t helpful. And after the second time there was nothing new and we got bored by his bragging because this guy didn’t care who he talked to as he just kept telling the same stories.

Isn’t this just like a typical small business web site?
Not once on the page is there any recognition of who the web market is. Not once does the web site mention a problem their market experiences and the causes for the problem. Not once is there a sense that the web site cares about the market and wants to serve that market.

No, all that the web site shows is that the only interest is in selling us something whether we need it or not. That’s their story being told over and over.

The bottom line about customer relations
As small business owners we get in our own way and totally block any communication with our own market when we focus on our product or service. Nobody is interested in us talking about ourselves and what we have to sell.

Read any business home page and it tells you about the company and why you should be impressed with the company, but you cannot find a clue as to the market. Not even with X-ray vision can you find who the market is.

Our market wants to know how we can solve their problems and we totally ignore the issue while we talk about product features and benefits. We actually think that a product description is real content – but no one cares about our product description, in fact, no one even cares about our product until they know it really has a solution to their biggest problem.

How does it feel?
How does it feel when someone ignores you?
How does it feel when someone asks you to buy?
How does it feel when someone asks us how they can help?

The last of those 3 questions is what attracts us the most. It captures our interest and our curiosity. It is just like getting a free gift because that is what it is, and we are going to benefit by learning something we never knew before.

How did we get here in the first place?
How did we come to build such poor marketing web sites? We got here by listening to web designers instead of thinking with a business mind. Web designers paid a lot of attention to us and our business and it all felt good and so we thought we were on the right track. The end result is that our web site pays a lot of attention to our business and zero to our web market.

Lesson learned
We cannot let our web designer be the one to design our web site. All we want our designer for is to do the technical aspects of building a web site. It is our job as small business owners to figure out what our web market wants and how to serve them best.

Okay, so you want ideas on how to display your helpful information and a web designer could help if they forgot all about their trendy design packages. It is going to take something different in web design to put your helpful information first, but in bite size chunks.

Navigation for information is going to take some thinking. Hypertext lists may work. Paragraph intro with hide and click drop down information may work. Hover text with slide in info may work. The real job of a web designer is to help you find and use the best means of providing information to your market.

Seeing your market
I challenge you to go look at your home page, or any other business, and see if you can figure out who the market is. Almost all small business web sites fail to identify their market and you can’t build a relationship by saying, “Hey you, look at what we have!” But you might sell if your web site said, “Hey farmer Jones, would you like a fence post that lasts 100 years?”

How do you get X-Ray eyes?
To acquire x-ray eyes you just need to look inward, that’s where you find all your insight. It’s not difficult at all and if you’ve ever been caught daydreaming then you are using insight.

We need to pretend that we are the market. We are the homeowner with a leaky pipe, or the guy with a hole in his shoe. Whatever we sell we need to be that market and wrap ourselves up in the problem that this market has. If we don’t feel the pain then we can’t talk about it, and we want to talk about that pain and how we are going to solve the problem that creates the pain.

When we then put our eyes back on our own web site we can see through the filler we thought was real web content. We can see as our market sees and we will find lots of things in need of change.

Using logic and foresight
Analysis and logic can confirm, or it can contradict the feelings and insight you have about your market. I recommend using insight and if logic doesn’t back it up then toss out the logic.

Why toss out the logic?
The web does not work with factual data like demographics. Instead, web marketing works best with psycho-graphics where beliefs, habits, Likes & dislikes, and shared values play a big role in defining a market. These are intangible and emotional values that are difficult to back up with logic.

We need to go with our emotions and intuition because they are the same tools we use when developing social skills, and our web site is sorely lacking in social skills.

Before we even think about connecting with social networks we need our web site to express its own social attitudes.

If you read the excellent Hubspot blog, you readily come across the statement that “email marketing converts higher than any other form of web marketing.” One of the reasons I believe this to be true, is down to the fact that an email is very much like a one on one conversation, we’re focused on it’s contents. This is in contrast to social media, or generic web pages where there are all kinds of distractions to take us away from a specific message. Now this doesn’t mean that we should focus all of our assets and attention on email marketing exclusively. I never really see web channels as been better or worse than each other, instead I find it’s more a case of looking at where they fit in to the overall goal of discovering and converting new people to your tribe. How do your web marketing channels play as part of your web marketing team?

If we see an email in our inbox from someone whom we trust, or want to connect with, we read it with a more focused intention then we would do a quick, fun post on someone’s Facebook page. Email and social media are very different kinds of web marketing channel. As briefly discussed above, email is more like a one-on-one conversation. Provided we feel a certain trust with the person who originally sent the email, we are happy to give its contents the same kind of attention as if they were speaking to us via the phone.

On the other hand, social media pages are bit like being in a bar – often a very crowded bar! We don’t have a lot of airspace to say too much or to be too sophisticated. If it wasn’t enough to have many others messaging around us, social media also often limits the number of characters we can actually type. To entice people to listen to us on social media, we have to deliver a message quickly and with lots of strong energy. We can use images, or video, to capture people’s eyes, but whether we use words or more, our overall aim should be to entice them enough to click through and join us somewhere less crowded, i.e. our own web pages.

Even when people are on our own web pages we still can’t quite get all deep and meaningful with them like we can on email! Right now, we need to impress them. We have their attention, now we need to fuel it further. What better way than giving them something really useful, interesting and above all, free? In other words, we are treating them – because we want to get to know them better. This also sounds very much like we’re bringing in another web marketing channel commonly known as content marketing too.If our treat is enticing enough, we should get our visitors email address and permission to contact them again soon. It’s from here that we can really start to bring email marketing to the fore, we’ve moved from the noisy web marketing channel of social media, through the enticing temptations of content marketing to the more personal and thoughtful channel of email.

How long should we leave before we contact our new connections? We probably need to give them enough time to digests whatever it is we gave them as our treat. Things move quickly in the online world, the noisy bars of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all have lots of beautiful and enticing messages to click on instead. So, a good guide is to leave your people alone for a couple of days and then email. We’re within our email channel now and we can be more thoughtful and insightful, provided we don’t become boring. Ask how they got on with our treat? Do they have any questions? Then cover off a common question that we are often asked that we want to share the answer to with them. Include information on who we are and what we believe in, what makes us different to everybody else they can find out there within our world. Always invite responses, questions and feedback – after all, you’re getting to know your new connection a lot better now. Managed well, by combining the different merits of social media and email marketing together within one overall web marketing strategy, you’ll start to turn complete strangers into leads who open your emails and seek to do business with you, when their need arises.

For the purpose of this article, we have focused on social media and email marketing as two web marketing channels working together, albeit with a little help from content marketing too. Instead of being viewed as individual lead generation channels, they actually all need each other in order to entice and develop new relationships online. On its own, email marketing will struggle to entice the connections that social media can bring, whilst social media will struggle to convey the deeper conversations that email can. Both of them would achieve little without the content “treat” on offer. Your web marketing channels are a team, each with their own strengths and weaknesses that in turn, help them play an important part within your overall web marketing goals. It’s really less about what working and what isn’t, and more about how everything is working together and how that can be maximised that leads to successful web marketing overall.